I'm not sure how many of you noticed but there has been quite a reduction in performance up until last week. Last week, doing a long overdue review of logs I discovered that there was a lot, and I do mean a lot, of traffic much of it using malformed URL strings. I contacted my web host company and worked with them to install and configure some security software to alleviate the issue. After installing that software we saw a 90 (yes, 90) % reduction in traffic, the vast majority of which was coming from China and was related to either malformed (hacking) URLs or attempts to register spam bots.

The forums, from what I have seen, have increased in performance, but I'm keeping an eye on it as best I can. I just wanted to give everyone an update on this issue.

Now I'm home I just cleared the forum of all that hideous spam, there was literally hundreds of them. I tried this morning but I was at work and it would not work properly using my mobile phone. Thanks to those that reported.Stooge, your forum needs you!

Everyone seems to need me lately. On one hand it's nice to be needed, on the other, it's easy to drown in the cries for help. This isn't just the board, but in all aspects of my life at the moment.

As for this particular issue, I'm not sure there is much more I can do. I've put multiple filters in place, but the reality is there are thousands of spammers out there, and only a handful of us. All we can do is keep putting fingers in the dam and hoping it never bursts ...

A fun idea(well...my idea of fun at least): Report as many spambot messages as you can, getting a score count for every spambot message you've reported

Note from "Jack Frost"

Yeah, er, don't do this. Reporting spam helps, but if it's by a few bots, we can just go to their profiles and delete all of their posts from a report for each account. But if you make a report for each and every post...well, thats 153 reports that we have to close along with dealing with the spam. Thanks.